Friday, May 16, 2014

Obama's Christianity

Andrew Sullivan notes an under-rated influence on the President on The Daily Dish.

Partly because of the Muslim canard, very few have taken the president’s profession of Christianity very seriously. I’d argue it’s critical to his record and to his politics, but Christianist Republicans and secular Democrats have largely missed it because of ideological blinders.

At some point, a historian may take a look at Obama’s record and see in it the contours of this very modern Christianity: His Niebuhrian foreign policy, with a few moments of compassionate weakness (Libya) and his dogged resilience on expanding access to basic healthcare for millions come to mind. But it’s a theme way under-covered and a paradigm rich for interpretation. Obama’s religiosity is of a type that seems occluded in a culture riven between fundamentalism and scientism. But I suspect it is the religiosity of the American future.

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